This invention relates to a fire patrolling or supervising system which is suitable especially for a wide area such as a colossal structure, for example, a large-scale pavilion, an air-dome stadium, etc.
This invention further relates to a method for controlling the selection or assignment of a water discharging nozzle and selection of a fire extinguishing target.
In a fire extinguishing system including a water discharging nozzle which is installed in a structure having a wide supervisory region, such as a stadium or pavilion, there has been known a system in which a position of a fire is detected by a fire sensor when the sensor scanning the supervisory region has detected the fire and the water discharging nozzle is actuated to discharge water in response to the detection data. For example, there is a technique in which a fire position co-ordinate (x, y) in a two-dimensional co-ordinate, in which a positional information output from the fire sensor is viewed planely, is calculated and a distance between the fire and the water discharging nozzle is calculated on the basis of the fire position co-ordinate (x, y). This technique is know from Japanese Jitsuyo Kokai Gazette No. 61-78395 (based on this Japanese application, U.S. application Ser. No. 854,932 was filed on Apr. 23, 1986, U.K. application No. 8610166 was filed on Apr. 25, 1986, West German application was filed on Apr. 26, 1986 and Australian application was filed on Apr. 22, 1986 ).
However, in case a single water discharging nozzle is assigned for one fire sensor on the one-to-one basis, even if the entire supervisory region can be patrolled by one fire sensor, a dead space where water discharged from the water discharging nozzle can not reach may remain because the supervisory region may too large for the assigned nozzle. A plurality of water discharging nozzles must be provided to enable extinguishment for whole area of the supervisory region. However, there still remains a problem of determining which discharge nozzle should be selected to surely extinguish the fire after detection of the fire by the fire sensor. In this connection, it is to be noted that it needs complex calculation for selecting the optimum water discharging nozzle for the position of fire based of the fire position information. Namely if the following calculation may be used to determine the optimum water discharging nozzle:
1. calculate the distances of the fire from the water discharging nozzles, respectively, PA1 2. select a optimum water discharging nozzle to extinguish the fire based on the result of the above calculation (1) and reaches of nozzles,
and if two or more nozzles may come under the condition to be selected as the optimum nozzle for extinguishing a fire, it would be a very complex determination to select a more optimum nozzle.
Moreover, in the conventional technique, when a plurality of fires start within the supervisory region simultaneously, the sizes of the detected fires are compared with each other to determine the priority order of extinguishing, or the degree of danger is judged by a lookout for selecting a fire extinguishing target, considering the possibility of fire spread. Thus, there are such problems that it takes a time to calculate the sizes of the fires and the judgment by the lookout might possibly be inadequate to wrongly select an extinguishing target of less danger.
The present invention has been made with a view to obviating such problem involved in the conventional techniques, and it is an object of the present invention to provide fire supervising system and a fire extinguishing target determining method, which is capable of selecting a water discharging nozzle directly from a fire position information without calculating a distance between the fire position and the water discharging nozzle, and capable of automatically selecting a fire, as a fire extinguishing target, which has the highest priority level, when a plurality of fires start at different places within the supervisory region.
To achieve this object, the present invention features a fire supervising system which comprises: at least one fire sensor for detecting a fire starting within a supervisory region to output a positional information of the detected fire; one or more water discharging nozzles for discharging water into the supervisory region; a section setting means for dividing the supervisory region into a matrix pattern to set a plurality of sections; a section identifying means which is input with the fire position information from the fire sensor to identify the section corresponding to said position information; and a nozzle control means for selecting a water discharging target to drive the water discharging nozzle on the basis of an output from the section identifying means and a priority order of the sections which is set preliminarily.
The present invention further features a fire supervising system which comprises: at least one fire sensor for detecting a fire starting within a supervisory region to output a positional information of the detected fire; a plurality of water discharging nozzles for discharging water into the supervisory region; a section setting means for dividing the supervisory region into a matrix pattern to set a plurality of sections; a section identifying means which is input with the fire position information from the fire sensor to identify the section corresponding to said position information; and a nozzle control means for selecting one of the water discharging nozzles in charge, which are assigned for the respective sections, in response to an output from said section identifying means.
The present invention further features a method for determining a fire extinguishing target which comprises dividing a fire supervisory region into a matrix pattern to set a plurality of sections; identifying the section corresponding to a position of a fire from the positional information of the fire starting within the supervisory region which has been output from a fire sensor; and selecting a water discharging target for a water discharging nozzle based on a priority order which has been preliminarily set for the respective sections.
The present inventions as described above are implemented with the support of a computer and the setting of the sections, identification of the setting and the control of the nozzle or nozzles are attained by utilizing various functions of the computer, such as storing, controlling or calculating.
More specifically, the present invention can curtail a time necessary for the processing for nozzle selection and determine definitely the priority order of each of fires as a fire extinguishing target upon identification of the section number when a plurality fires start at different places within the supervisory region. Therefore, the position of the fire which is to be the first fire extinguishing target can be determined rapidly and accurately. Furthermore, the optimum one of the plural water distinguishing nozzles can be selected to start an appropriate fire extinguishing operation. Thus, a time otherwise wasted between the fire detection and the water discharge starting would be saved very much to improve a fire extinguishing operation at an early state.